Bizarre Conspiracies: USAID Edition
People are weird.
Looking for something else entirely, I noticed that USAID was trending on the Platform Formerly Known as Twitter. Wondering if perhaps a judge had ruled that the Trump administration’s unilateral shuttering of a Congressionally-funded agency was unlawful, I clicked through only to find people claiming (among other things) that Jimmy Kimmel was suspended, not because President Trump’s FCC chair had threatened retaliation but because the erstwhile development agency had stopped funneling huge amounts of cash to keep the show on the air.
Apparently, not only was USAID funding Kimmel but also Stephen Colbert, Howard Stern, Joy Reid, and The View. And POLITICO. And, naturally, George Soros, Black Lives Matter, and Antifa. They even paid for Chelsea Clinton’s wedding!
Big news if true.
You’ll be shocked to learn that none of these things are true. (Well, except for a few thousand in subscription fees to POLITICO.)
Some of these claims have been floating around since February and have been debunked. See, for example,
- BBC, “False video claims Hollywood stars were paid by USAID to visit Ukraine”
- Snopes, “Fact Check: USAID paid $44K to Politico, not over $8M as White House claimed. It was for subscriptions“
- AP, “Claims about USAID funding are spreading online. Many are not based on facts“
I don’t know where the notion that USAID was funding various talk shows came from, but it’s so absurdly ridiculous that it defies comprehension that anyone would possibly believe it. Indeed, the same people—rightly—point to the low ratings of these shows. Why would even a sinister leftist arm of the Deep State invest in targeting a handful of people who stay up late to watch?
Of course, these people also believe that Howard Stern has been canceled based on a rumor-sourced report in a British tabloid that has been debunked. And that “The View” has been canceled, when it just took its standard summer hiatus and is back on the air.
By now it’s clear MAGAts will believe anything except the truth.
Along the same lines, I made the mistake of clicking on the comments of a local news story wherein a local health expert was pointing out that COVID is still a thing. Some of the responses included pleas for people to “do their own research” and more than one post questioning virology as a legitimate area of study (and basically rejecting the germ theory of disease).
Sigh.
@Steven L. Taylor:
“Do your own research” generally means, in this context, “make a list of semi-literate crackpot blogs that appear to support your contention.”
@CSK: 100%
This is all so very, very exhausting.
I saw a comment recently that said something along the lines of “maybe the internet wasn’t such a great idea after all.”
I don’t think I’m there (yet) (I mean, I’ve met all of you lovely people via the internet), but YEESH boy howdy did it make it easy and comfortable for the whackadoodles to surface.
@Jen:
I’ve been using one form or another of the internet since dial-up days at 1200 baud* c.1991, and online a year before then (local BBSes)
IMO, the internet was a great idea.
Social media now, as driven by engagement and data mining, that was the epitome of terrible, no good, awful, horrific, disgusting, execrable, bad, worst idea ever.
That said, back before social media was enshitified and everything hid behind an insurmountable pay wall, it was rather ok. I found this gem of a blog by following someone who followed the late, and much missed, Doug in Fakebook. I also found history podcasts there. but that was around 2012, before the dark times.
* I even remember when the upgrade to a 9600 baud modem seemed fast
@Jen: Social media, of a particular type, was the big mistake. Not the internet in general.
I think the elements that are critical is
1. “upvotes but no downvotes”, which act as a skinner box to train people to be more outrageous.
2. The Algorithm which makes it really easy to find those people who will swallow your bullshit.
3. Categorizing anger as “engagement” and tuning the algorithm for more of it.
4. Not providing any moderation.
So we have a “tragedy of the commons”, which is absolute pollution of shared public spaces.
I love the internet. I helped create it, I have been reading blogs and participating since about 2002 or so. I spent only the briefest time on Facebook, because it kind of turned my stomach when the app asked me “X wants to be your friend (Accept)(Decline)”. That struck me as horrifyingly manipulative. There’s no “friendship” involved here, or if there is, it isn’t because of FB.
But immediately humans started competing on who could have the most “friends”, answering the manipulation. Because they want to leverage my most meaningful and important relationships into advertising, injected into the cracks of this, because they believe (and for good reason) that this will give their stuff a better reception. Which it does, AFAIK.
I have very little to say that can be said in 140 characters, nor do I think there is much that can be said in 140 characters that would be of interest to me. So I ignored Twitter. It turns out it has the same problems, dressed up in different clothing.
I have fears about Bluesky, because it appears to have the same architectural problems that X does.
In contrast, a blog like this is moderated. Reddit is moderated. Any subreddit I go to (mostly about board games and/or computer games) in consequence demonstrates good behavior, which stays on topic. Reddit has downvoting.
Yes, Reddit allows people to create subreddits where they propagate lies and propaganda. I think you could make a case, as a private organization, that there were things you would not allow on your website – censorship. Reddit has been very limited in what they shut down, and that’s a fair criticism.
By the way, I do not advocate for a way to shut down Stormfront. Or 4chan, or even 8chan. These are dead-ends, and the users there kind of know it. This is why they try to slip things into YouTube and FB and X, and sprinkle bread crumbs leading one further and further into the dank world of conspiracy and hate. And the Algorithm, which is what is the biggest problem, helps them (and doesn’t exist on Reddit).
@Jay L. Gischer: I get what both you and Kathy are saying, but social media isn’t the whole problem. It enables sharing, yes. But the ability to set up a website quickly and easily, means that non-critical thinkers can land on any kind of website and connect with others who share decidedly…non-mainstream views. It also provides a level of anonymity that allows for behavior that wouldn’t fly in polite company. The internet has accelerated the proliferation of absolute garbage that used to be gatekept by media outlets. Sure, you had batboy on the cover of the National Enquirer and The Sun etc., but the ratio of garbage: legitimate news was far different.
Message boards had their own issues, long before what we call “social media” came into the picture. I should note that I’ve worked as a media analyst for a number of years as an outgrowth of my PR work, so this is something I’ve spent time thinking about.
@Jen: I see the point, but didn’t this start with cable news, and talk radio? Accelerated by the internet, of course.
It is a statistical fact that 50% of people are dumber than average. And average can be pretty fuckin’ dumb. This fact explains a lot of our problems. Consider that it took homo sapiens more than a million years to come up with the wheel. We are the most intelligent species on Earth, but in a biosphere populated largely by bacteria and fungi, that’s damning with faint praise.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Which seems to equate to “study at YouTube University, move on to Facebook College, and do post-grad work at Xitter Academy.”
On the whole, I doubt the value of this particular curriculum.
@Michael Reynolds:
I’m inclined to disagree: the basic potential mental capacity of most humans seems to be quite effective.
The problem is most people, for their own various reasons, often prefer to accept received wisdom rather than think for themselves.
And sometimes even education is just inserting new sets of “received wisdom”.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing: if you reject the entire “received wisdom” of, say, civil engineering, your bridges may not end up working very well.
Humans are social animals, and most people just default to general opinion; or when rejecting that, to adhere to some other “oppositional” grouping.
And then adopt the entire “group-thought” package as a given.
Incidentally. the wheel was not of obvious use absent both domesticated animals and a need for large scale movement of materials.
Neither of which applied to paleolithic Homo.
(Trying hard to work in a fungi joke here, but failing. Not mushroom for one?)
@Michael Reynolds:
50% are dumber (or at least as dumb as) than the median, not average.
Assume that IQs are not bullshit, and that in a population one person has an IQ of 200, one person has an IQ of 100, and 10 people have IQs of 90. The average is exactly 100. There’s one person above average, one person at average and 10 below average.
Average: add up all the values, divide by the number of values. It urns out 9/12th of all people are below average. 75%. We could swap numbers (one person has an IQ of 0, 10 with 110) and get 75% above average, and have deep concerns with what that one person remembers to breathe.
The median is 90. Arrange all the people in order of ascending IQ, and pick the IQ of the person in the middle.
This becomes incredibly relevant when dealing with taxes, social policies, income distributions, and people claiming that 50% of people are below average. The distribution (the shape that explains how people are arranged by IQ, in this instance) also becomes very important — with most data sets it will fall along one of a few common patterns.
This is just my way of saying that maybe you’re below average. Definitely with statistics.
There’s also the question of what to do with outliers. Often they are dropped just to get data that is useful. This process is best explained by the tumblr post “the average person eats 10 spiders a year, but this includes Spiders Georg who eats 10,000 spiders a year, and is an outlier that that should be ignored.”
All hail Spders Georg, eater of spiders.
Georg! Georg! Georg!
@JohnSF:
I’d say that the problem is that people are absolutely shitty judges of where to receive wisdom from.
Without received wisdom, we would still be stuck in the Stone Age. Which might be better, but that’s another matter. Even if we limit “received wisdom” to things an individual can prove, I don’t think we get transistors.
Don’t receive wisdom from the guy with brain worms who cut the head off a whale, strapped it to the roof of his car and drove home, making his children wear plastic bags because of the … sigh … whale juices dripping in.
Of course, the real problem is that a weasel got into a supercollider in 2015, and we’ve been going along an insane alternate timeline ever since. We should stick another weasel in the supercollider and see what happens.
(Expected result is negligible, but just like the lottery, the cost is a weasel and a dream)
@Gustopher: A day or two ago I commented here that half of voters are below average. It occurred to me that it’s really below median, and also that a standard deviation or so below is not really very far below. I mentally drafted a couple of awkward rewrites, decided that “average” would be perfectly well understood, and stuck with mis-quoting Garrison Keillor.
@Michael Reynolds:
Can’t let this one pass. I think H. Sapiens is 300,000 years old or so. Therefore, the delay of the wheel has to be shared with H. Habilis, H. Erectus, and several others. 😀
@Jen:
I’ll stipulate to all that.
However, it bears remembering that growing a blog audience required more effort and skill that doing the same in social media. Not least because the potential audience interested in long, well written, reasoned blog posts was far smaller than those interested in memes, short videos, short put downs, etc.
Think of social media as the soundbites of the internet.
There are many other factors, such as Google’s monopsony position in online advertising, the rise of smart phones (which favor short content), and lots, lots more.
How would the internet be different absent social media, or absent data mining and addictive engagement, is a counterfactual we can’t determine.
@Gustopher:
One reality is weasally likely.
The other is stoatilly implausible.
🙂
Whatever they need to make them sleep after condemning millions of people to death, I guess.